Return to Sender

Rosamund Pike picked up an Oscar nomination for her brilliantly unhinged turn in ‘Gone Girl’, and she returns to familiar territory in this dark, satisfying indie. Pike is Miranda, an uppity-yet-likeable nurse who’s brutally raped in her home. Struggling with post-traumatic stress, she resolves to visit her attacker in prison, and, through a series of jarring flirting-through-the-perspex meetings, they appear to grow close.It’s an uncomfortable relationship to witness, but, despite appearing sincere, we’re left questioning Miranda’s true intentions. Is she as all-forgiving as she appears to be? Or is this a carefully calculated set-up for an almighty vengeful finale? Put it this way, there’s no way an actress of Pike’s intelligence would have signed on for what looks like, until the last ten minutes, a very poorly judged forgive-and-forget morality tale. And besides, the clue’s in the title.Props to Pike, then, for making an inevitable twist feel like a shock conclusion. Were it not for her trademark icy, enigmatic delivery, this could easily have been a shoddily transparent slice of revenge schlock, rather than a smart, subtly pitched thriller with a fist-pumping feminist finale.

A Little Chaos

‘A Little Chaos’ is, you imagine, what Alan Titchmarsh might dream about after watching ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Kate Winslet plays a pioneering seventeenth-century gardener in the French court of Louis XIV, and she’s the best thing about the film. Wearing a corset so tight that it’s a miracle she can breathe, let alone act, she gives an emotionally switched-on performance as Sabine de Barra, a woman with nothing to lose after the death of her husband and daughter. Scandalising the court, she applies for a job with André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts), the real-life landscape architect behind the Gardens of Versailles. Sabine, bosom heaving, bonds with André over the begonias. But the usually excellent Schoenaerts is a big letdown, doing what can only be described as dead-fish acting while sporting a career-killing, straggly haircut. To be fair, he does have to work with some hilarious dialogue: ‘Your heart beats furiously, mine just ticks’. Helen McCrory gives ‘House of Cards’ First Lady Claire Underwood a run for her money in the ruthless-bitch stakes as his viper of a wife, while Alan Rickman, also directing, is as dry as a desert in a drought as Louis.

Aloha

It’s been four years since Cameron Crowe, director of sticky, heartwarming all-American comedies like ‘Almost Famous’ and ‘Jerry Maguire’ last made a film – the very nice but forgettable ‘We Bought a Zoo’. Now he’s back with a Hawaii-set romcom packed with more celebrities than Vanity Fair’s Oscars party. We can’t quite get our heads around the plot. But Bradley Cooper seems to be some kind of military contractor on his uppers. The trailer opens with him getting a royal bollocking from his boss Alec Baldwin. Then he’s off Hawaii to fly planes with Emma Stone and have deep and meaningfuls with his ex (Rachel McAdams). It all looks typically Crowe – sunny and sweet – and we’re enjoying Bill Murray dispensing twinkly, hard-won wisdom in the trailer.